International Lab Meetings and Overview of the Participants

The European/International Joint PhD in Social Representations and Communication International Lab Meetings, successor to the decade of International Summer Schools, provides an important opportunity for young researchers to obtain advanced academic and technical skills needed to conduct state-of-the-art research. Three events are organised each year around the theme of Social Representations in Action and Construction in Media and Society and focus on advanced practical training for the participants. The first two events each year integrate virtual and face-to-face sessions, aimed at training doctoral students in meta-theoretical analysis of the literature. The following one is face-to-face intensive training courses requiring the physical mobility of participants and open to long-term dissemination via web. These events share common objectives and have a didactic structure with multiple training opportunities for critical analysis of the link between multi-media communication systems and social representations. The methods, techniques, software packages and related method theory guiding applications in research design, will provide the unifying theme for each event of the proposed advanced courses. The topics developed in the participants' research projects presented and discussed during the workshops will provide a variety of societal issues mediated and constructed via traditional and new media.

The program's originality is in its training methods, combining face-to-face interactions in a variety of training situations (workshops, lectures, presentations) with mediated virtual interaction (internet forum discussions, web videoconferencing, streaming videos), enabling us to guarantee long-term dissemination of scientific events. Scientific activities include key lectures, workshops, participant presentations, methodological training, evaluation sessions, final juries for dissertations and post event evaluations via online questionnaires. Their didactic structure provides multiple training opportunities for the critical analysis of the link between multi-media communication systems and social representations and is inspired by a strong multidisciplinary approach. Topics and Research areas are clearly relevant to EU policy and include the information society and science popularisation, new socialization and communication strategies, social psychology research based knowledge applied for politics, health, the environment, social minorities, gender, etc. The methods, techniques, software packages and related method theory guiding applications in research design provide a unifying theme for the proposed advanced course. Key lectures expand the summer school's horizon to other communication fields such as semiotics, linguistics, sociology, mass communications, media studies, etc.

The events are held at the European/International Joint PhD in S.R. & C.'s Research Centre and Multimedia Lab located at the coordinating University of Rome "Sapienza", a fully equipped high-tech centre that that guarantees technical support for training and management activities, including realtime interactive exchanges with a vast network of other similarly equipped research centres both in and outside Europe. Its web-based system, which includes dedicated video-chats, forum discussions and multipoint videoconferences via web-auditorium, is highly flexible and easily adapted to provide support for the Lab Meetings' training needs. The use of these ICT tools and services will support the events' preparation and follow-up, thereby contributing to the creation of a sustainable learning community in the concerned subject area.